Fifty-one inmates died in a fire in a Colombian prison

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Fifty-one inmates died due to a fire that broke out during a revolt in the prison of Tuluá, a city in Colombia west of Bogota, the capital. Thirty other inmates were injured and taken to hospital. The general in charge of the country’s prison agency, Tito Castellanos, said that an investigation was launched to clarify what happened, but he anticipated that the fire broke out after the inmates set fire to some mattresses, of them initiative, to prevent guards from stopping a protest.

The Tuluá prison contains 1,267 inmates and the block where the fire occurred housed 180. Colombian prisons have a serious overcrowding problem: there are 81 thousand places, but the people present are about 97 thousand, according to official data.

Outgoing Colombian President Iván Duque, on a visit to Portugal, wrote on Twitter that he was “in solidarity with the families of the victims” and had “given instructions” to carry out the investigations that will allow “to clarify this terrible situation”.

President-elect Gustavo Petro – a left-wing progressive who won the elections last June and will take office next August – wrote that the Colombian state has thought of prison as a place “for revenge and not for rehabilitation” and that what happened in Tuluá “forces a complete rethinking of prison policy” so that the “dignity of the prisoner” is put at the center.

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